


I of the Beholding

by grossferatu



Series: Feral Jon [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Anal Sex, Ankle Cuffs, Blood, Blow Jobs, Cannibalism, Compulsion, Dubious Consent, F/M, Feeding, Flashbacks, Friendship, Gags, Implied/Referenced Isolation, Kissing, M/M, Mild Gore, Muzzles, Starvation, Threesome - F/M/M, Trauma, feral jonathan sims, hunger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:07:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22733803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grossferatu/pseuds/grossferatu
Summary: Jon is hungry and needs to go on a hunt. Daisy's his minder. Elias keeps him safe.Martin's the reason he's the way he is.Heed the tags!
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Elias Bouchard/Jonathan Sims, Elias Bouchard/Jonathan Sims/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Jonathan Sims/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Series: Feral Jon [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634239
Comments: 14
Kudos: 112





	1. Chapter 1

Elias has Jon in a muzzle specially designed for human faces (not that Jon is human anymore, but it’s the shape that counts) and chained to the wall in his office. He has just enough slack to pace in a circle, and he snarls when anyone approaches, but that’s not Elias’s fault. He wasn’t the one who starved him for so long, broke his mind into small pieces with hunger and left him covered with half-lidded eyes desperately soaking in every piece of new stimulus.

He’s kept clean, in nice clothes and soft shoes and even a necktie that Elias ties for him. On good days, Jon dresses himself, because the part of him that has a sense of humor likes the idea of someone with his unimpressive aesthetic causing terror anyway. On good days, when he’s full, he’s allowed off the chain to wander the Institute, a shadow of an archivist with eyes like a card catalogue.

Today is not a good day. Today, Elias has been busy for a week and hasn’t been able to let him out to feed, and Jon would be chewing at his bonds if he could use his mouth, but he can’t, of course. On good days he understands that he’s too obvious sometimes, that he can’t just flit about the city like a mad ghost, but on bad days like today his thoughts are nothing except _hunger_ and _empty_ and _I want to know_.

He paces another circle. He doesn’t just want a statement, though the Watcher is demanding to be fed, screaming at him behind his eyes and drowning out his thoughts. He wants to hunt, wants to feed that other god, the one that crept in when his friends locked him in a room ‘for his own good’ and didn’t think that he’d be inhuman enough to be like a bear caught in a trap and hurt himself so much. Elias doesn’t like that he serves two masters, that’s one of the reasons why he’s muzzled like a mad dog about to be put down and dissected for rabies.

Martin comes by and Jon lunges at him, stopped only by the chain. He loves Martin, wants to tear his heart from his chest but more importantly make him understand that _this is his fault_. Martin still has hope that Jon can be ‘fixed,’ and it makes Jon want to die when he has enough thoughts to want anything complex. Melanie at least, Jon understands. She is slaughter and betrayed and filled with anger at a rival god. Martin is supposed to be theirs, but instead is a little bit Peter Lucas’s and a little bit Anabelle Cain’s and a little bit too convinced of his own precious humanity. Mostly, when he sees Martin today, he wants to sink his teeth under the other man’s collar bone and put an eye there, claim his for the Watcher for good.

But instead he just Watches Martin close the door and slumps back against the wall, exhausted from his anger and his hunger. Elias won’t let him eat Martin, he won’t let himself eat Martin, he cares too much and Martin is too _important_ , and yet here is he, thoughtless and shaking and wasting the last shreds of his self-awareness to remember slamming his head against a locked door and the taste of red-ink blood in his mouth.

He’s so busy following Martin down the hall through the eyes of the portraits on the walls that he only half-notices the door open again. His attention is forced back into the eyes in his face when he feels fingers tug on his collar. It’s a plain black choker, not a dog collar like Elias threatened once, but that subtlety carries more weight than any obvious thing ever could.

It’s Daisy. She, unlike Martin, understands. She’s also Elias’s, but like Basira she is safe, trustworthy, not permanently half-starved and hungry.

“Come on,” Daisy whispers, and she kneels to undo the cuff around his leg. She’s barely stood up again when he tackles her, pressing her against the wall, teeth clamped onto the side of her neck. Her skin is too thick and his teeth too blunt and she pushes him off of her, pressing a short, sharp knife into his hands. “It’s time to hunt.”

-

It’s night, at least, which means Jon’s eyes don’t have to deal with the sun. After everything that’s changed about him, he’s still photosensitive after long stints in the dark, and he spends so much time inside now that the sun burns him whenever it’s light out.

He follows Daisy for now, matching her footsteps. The area around the Institute is open season, and this time, she tells him as she adjusts his muzzle, she’s going to let him take the lead on who they’re hunting. She seems to know, from the knife and the way her eyes glitter, that he’s not just looking for fear to eat.

They find a blond man in a soft grey t-shirt with sad eyes to match. Daisy laughs, a low rumble in her chest, and he jumps, turning back to look at them, a stocky woman with wolf teeth and a tall, lanky guy in a suit with a muzzle over the lower part of his face, and flees.

He can’t run fast enough. Jon gets to him first, taken over by one of his now-many conflicting instincts, and knocks him to the ground. He has the knife in his hand, a diagram of the human body in his head, and he presses the blade into the soft part under the guy’s ribs, feeling the give of flesh and the slickness on his fingers. He stabs the guy again, in the belly, drinking in his screams of pain, but then he’s distracted by an old memory that leaks out of his thoughts and the knife twists, moves, nicks a hip bone before Jon pulls it out again and lies it flat against his stomach.

Jon’s not good at this at all, even though he _knows_ how to kill someone he never quite manages, sidetracks himself by playing with his food like a cat. He’s not like Daisy, efficient, or Basira, humane, he’s messy and that’s Martin’s fault too, he thinks, making him something worse than out of practice. Or maybe that’s just Jon, again, and he whimpers as the knife slips completely from his hands, fingers needing at the gash he’s made in the guy’s stomach. He’s bleeding out, but not dead yet, but he can’t just _ask_ because he’s muzzled, and he can’t take the muzzle off because he’s not supposed to so he just drags one of his bloody hands down his face, through his hair, thinking about Martin again, how his ribs would look cracked open under Jon’s hands.

Daisy takes the muzzle away and the words _Tell me why you’re here, so close to the Institute_ fall out of Jon’s mouth on their own.

The guy answers, the Beholding keeping his dying voice steady, and his words fill Jon’s head like nitrous oxide until he’s laughing, giddy from finally getting a meal, ashamed from being so pathetic that he can’t even kill someone properly anymore.

Daisy crushes the man’s throat and Jon eats that too, lets the moment of knowledge he’s about to die that cuts off as his brain shuts down consciousness flow through him.

He’s kneeling, he realizes, and Daisy feeds him strips of the man’s skin until he feels like he could burst from how full he is. He’s crying, maybe, and she wipes the blood off his face and puts the muzzle back on and leads him back to the Institute.

They pass Martin. Jon waves, smile hidden by the muzzle, and Martin frowns, a worried little expression, but even that can’t sour his good mood.

He’s giggling when she chains him back to the wall and sits down. “A book?” she asks, and he nods. He can speak in when the muzzle’s on his face like this, not so tight as when he’s full on biting mad, but he doesn’t always want to. She goes to fetch him one, but he must not be hiding his need as well as he thinks he is because she smiles at him and asks, “How badly do you want to be used?”

He bares his throat to answer.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elias has his fun.

Jon’s on his knees with an o-ring gag on. That’s his fault, he’s too bity when his mouth is free, even when he’s being good, so Daisy pries his lips apart and forces it in, letting his drool all over his chin.

His shirt should need to be cleaned again, but blood stains have a habit of disappearing from his clothes now, as though keeping up a camouflage.

He’s excited—he can’t help himself—and it gets worse when Daisy mutters something about being good and shutting up, so he’s rocking back and forth on his knees. Daisy grabs his head and line ups and forces her cock, hard from the hunt and manhandling him, into his mouth. He can’t do anything but take her fucking his face like this, choke on her length when she hits the back of his throat.

He’s hard, cock straining against his pants, but that doesn’t matter as much as remembering, halfway through, that he doesn’t need to breathe if he doesn’t want to.

Daisy comes with a long thrust that hits the remnants of Jon’s gag reflex.

When she pulls out, Jon falls forward a little, hands going between his legs without thinking about it.

“Not yet,” Daisy warns, grabbing his fingers. Jon moans. “We have to wait for Elias to get back.”

He’s almost certainly watching, she thinks, or maybe hopes.

As though summoned, there is a careful knock on the door. Daisy opens it to find Elias looking slightly frazzled.

“Is everything alright?” Daisy asks, perhaps a little smug.

“I didn’t expect you to feed him,” Elias says. He’s smiling, almost a little drunk. “I liked it.”

He crowds in on Jon’s space, ignoring that Jon doesn’t really have a concept of _personal_ _space_ to violate anymore.

“You have impeccable taste in men,” Elias croons, dragging his thumb down the outside of one of Jon’s eyes. “It’s very good of you.”

Daisy snorts. Elias is amusing when he gets like this, unable to express something as mundane as attraction except through a proxy, shivering in the newness of the feeling two hundred years after his originally body first survived puberty.

Jon whimpers. Elias carefully removes the gag, and Jon immediately bites at one of his fingers. “You’re always hungry, aren’t you?” Elias whispers, asking a question despite obviously knowing the answer. His teasing tone is undercut with a hard edge of rage.

The only reason he hasn’t killed Martin is because the Beholding doesn’t want him to, because Jon doesn’t want him to.

Jon sucks at Elias’s ring finger instead of answering. He’s figured out he’s not going to be allowed to get off, so his focus has drifted off his body and back to his hunger.

“Do you want to use him?” Daisy asks.

“No,” Elias says, tone of voice still awed and a little bit reverent. “I’ve… satisfied those needs for now.” He’s crooning again. “I’ll take care of you, don’t worry. Just be good and follow me, don’t make too much trouble.”

Daisy has enough experience with them both by now to know this means it’s time to fetch the leash, and she smiles to herself at Jon’s contented little sigh as Elias puts the muzzle back on his face.

Martin tries to accost them as they’re making their way down to the Archives. Jon tugs at his leash in his direction before shrinking away from him, eyes closed, body pressed against Elias, and Daisy stops walking, watches the two of them make their way down the hall.

“I keep hoping he’ll forgive me,” Martin says. “It hurts to see him like this.” This isn’t the first time he’s lurked outside of Elias’s office, stood there like a guilty animal.

“Does it?” Daisy has her suspicions about Martin, ones she hasn’t voiced because she frankly isn’t interested in his excuses, but what Eye tendencies she’s picked up from her time at the Institute compels her to needle him anyway.

Martin rolls his shoulders. He spends most of his time uncomfortable, supposedly refusing to retreat into the Lonely, and now isn’t much different. “His thing was control, wasn’t it?” he asks, rhetorically, and laughs a little. “Now look at him. Muzzled, on a leash, cuddling… _Elias_.”

“He doesn’t have to make hard choices anymore,” Daisy says. She would be jealous, if she didn’t see the bad days, if she hadn’t spent thirty minutes earlier watching strips of flesh slide down Jon’s throat.

“And you,” Martin starts, sounding betrayed. Daisy has heard the lead up to this speech multiple times; today, for once, she feels like letting him finish. “You were starving yourself, and now you’re… hunting with him. With Basira. You were supposed to be each other’s anchors.”

“She tried,” Daisy says. “It didn’t stick.” She should feel sorrow for that, mourn the Daisy who tried to die in the name of humanity, but like her death, it doesn’t stick.

“The world is… miserable, now,” Martin tries. “Everyone is so—” He stops, unable to continue. It’s not true, what he’s about to say. The world is miserable, but people are still happy, and most importantly to Daisy, those she loves are safe.

“Do you want me to hurt you?” Daisy asks. She asks it with the same tone own voice one might ask if the other person needs help with a heavy object. “Do you want me to dig my teeth into your neck and give you an injury that might actually stick on that body of yours?”

Martin makes a shocked little noise. “N-no,” he says, lying. Daisy doesn’t call him on it.

“Don’t worry,” Daisy says, “you’re just being stubborn.”

She leaves him to stare at her. She doesn’t want to be mean, exactly, but what is she supposed to do when he keeps not getting the exact consequence of what he did? Shaking her head, she catches up to Jon and Elias just as they reach the Archive proper.

It would be funny to see Jon fall on a pile of papers like they’re water in a desert if she didn’t have the full weight of context in her head. Instead, she winces as Jon grabs the box and tucks it against his chest, looking up at Elias.

He can eat them all here, if he wants to, Elias is in an obviously indulgent mood, but he doesn’t make any move to have the muzzle removed.

“Where are you going to put them?” Elias asks, still gentle.

Jon just blinks at him, and tugs at his leash back in the direction of Elias’s office.

_Use me_.

The request has more of an immediate effect on Elias than it does on Daisy. Picking Jon up (not difficult, a body sustained on meat and trauma does not have much substance) he picks up his pace, apparent fullness obviously no longer an issue.

Maybe he can feel Jon’s cock against stomach through his trousers. Daisy certainly enjoys imagining he can.

Elias is kind enough to fill her thoughts with what he’s planning: Jon on his hands and knees between them, unable to struggle out of their grip even as he fights them just enough to make it interesting.

Daisy should probably wince at the idea of Jon’s teeth anywhere near her dick, but he’s being good for now. If he tries anything, she can always shove the head of her cock at his eye, or something equally unpleasant for them both.

“Be nice,” Elias chides, meaning it.

Daisy snorts. “I am.”

-

Elias leaves the door unlocked and forces Jon onto his hands and knees, pulling down his trousers, his pants, with the sort of precision that leaves only his arse uncovered, keeping his cock stuck in fabric.

It doesn’t take much prep for him to be open under Elias’s fingers, not when this is the only thing his body is used for other than ferrying around his beautiful and unraveled thoughts.

Daisy is, as always, helpful but a little harsher than Elias would say he wants, forcing Jon’s jaw a little wider than comfortable, fucking him harshly from the moment Elias gives her the signal.

This means Elias can be gentle, ease his way inside Jon and enjoy the little moans he makes that make Daisy groan in turn.

It’s a shame, the shape his Archive’s in, but that doesn’t mean Elias doesn’t love him.

Finally, Elias takes pity on the shudder-wracked body beneath him and wraps a hand around his cock, the other hand still gripping Jon’s bony hip tight enough to leave bruises that will last maybe ten minutes after they’re done.

Afterwards, Jon lies sprawled the floor, sticky and temporarily content.

He knows today started as a bad day, but now he’s full and has a box full of statement for the next time Elias is gone too long.

“I’m sorry,” Elias says, and means it, even though he likes pushing Jon, even though Jon likes being pushed.

Daisy smooths back Jon’s hair and meets Elias’s gaze, a hint of a smile on her lips.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hello, Martin

Martin comes in again. Jon isn’t muzzled, has taken it off himself so he can read a few statements, let the dusty words fill him up until Daisy or Basira take him out again. He’s not even chained, and that upsets Martin for reasons he can’t quite articulate.

“Jon—” Martin starts, waiting for the end of a statement to speak.

Jon looks up. His eyes have their own light, now, and the lower part of his face is pale, scars even more visible than usual.

“I’ve been good,” Jon says primly. His smile is teasing, like he’s making a very funny inside joke. He stands, stretches, his movements parodies of casualness. He runs his teeth across his bottom lip and suddenly his playful expression disappears, replaced by a hollow, emotionless mask. “Why are you here, Martin?”

“I wanted to check on you,” Martin answers miserably. He keeps hoping that he’ll come in to find Jon whole again, but that’s hasn’t happened yet, may never happened.

“ _Martin_.” Jon repeats his name like a talisman. “You’re smart, lies aside. You know why I am.” He steps closer. “Basira is going to be very disappointed in me.”

Martin doesn’t expect him to be this fast, this strong. Jon is stick-thin, now, bones and shadows and worm scars. Jon has Martin pinned against the wall by the arms, the wall he’s usually chained too, within moments.

“You hurt me, Martin,” Jon says.

“I just wanted you to be human,” Martin whispers. It’s hard not to look at Jon’s eyes like this.

It’s not a statement. It’s just a flood of information into his mind.

“It would have killed me if I was human, Martin,” Jon says. “Did you know that?”

Martin can’t answer. He’s too swept up in the flow of memory to even try.

-

The door locks and Jon screams. He doesn’t want to, doesn’t like the feeling of it torn out of his throat, but the room is bare of everything except a mattress. No books, no windows, not even a patterned carpet for Jon to trace with his eyes.

The idea is, of course, detox, like Jon is a smoker (he is a smoker, that isn’t important), as though this was the sane solution even for drug addiction, as though locking a human in a box with nothing to _eat_ made sense even when that person isn’t human anymore.

Jon paces the length of the room, lies on the mattress and thinks of the plant where it was manufactured, of the shape of Martin’s hands as he installed it, but there’s not much he can do with an empty room, with darkness.

Less than a day in, he is hungry for the first time in months. Not Eye-hungry, body hungry, his stomach hollow and upset. He crawls to a corner and retches on the floor, nauseous, tired, and collapses back on the mattress, falling into fitful dreams that only occur because he’s already so exhausted.

He has no stamina anymore. Maybe it’s because he can’t see in the Dark.

Time unspools after the third day. He should be dying of thirst, but he can no longer feel it, not under the weight of the hunger in his belly and the emptiness of his thoughts. The Eye is still hungry; he cannot find food for it, so it turns on him, rifling through his memories at random and bringing them to the forefront, cannibalizing old statements remembered perfectly, over and over and over.

He ends up splayed on his stomach, not breathing, mouth crusted with dried spit, as the Unknowing replays before his eyes, intercut with the realization of what happened to Sasha and Melanie’s anger and his time in the hands of the Circus. Finally, the Eye dissects Martin, trying to catalogue, understand, why exactly he has done this to Jon.

His body, meanwhile, despite not needing to eat or breathe, is growing hungry, and on what may be the tenth day he chews his own wrists to strangely bloodless shreds. The wounds heal, of course, and Jon finds himself oddly sated from the meat.

He can’t remember what his mouth is doing, after. He’s barely aware of it in the moment, screams and babbles and autocannibalism all blurring together.

The Eye is not the fear of being alone in the dark. That is the domain of the Dark, the Lonely, perhaps the Hunt, and as Jon’s god chews on his mind, other gods flow through him like water. This is the new world, after all. They are all here.

“Archivist,” he hears, finally, a voice he recognizes but can’t name. “My Archivist, what has been done to you.” A hand on his cheek makes Jon flinch, and he can’t help himself, he surges upwards, shaking off the hand. He can see the person in front of him, too much information at once, and he’s so _hungry_ , he closes his eyes and grabs lapels and presses his blunt teeth against cool skin, meaning to bite down and draw blood.

A hand pulls his head back by the hair, the others clamps over his mouth. He tries to fight, jagged fingernails scratching at iron wrists, but he gets his head slammed into the nearest wall for his efforts.

“I’ll feed you,” Elias, and of course it’s Elias, who else would it be. His voice is indulgent, proud, furious. He’s not here to hurt Jon, but still Jon tries to bite through his hand, worrying flesh between his teeth before the Eye catches a loose thread of Elias’s thought.

That is the first time he feeds on Elias. He’s stuffed to the point of stupor, after, and doesn’t know where he is for along time.

-

Martin shudders as the memories flow through him. He thinks he ought to feel sick, or sad, but instead his thoughts keep returning to just how _alone_ Jon felt, trapped in his box in the dark.

“Oh,” Jon says. “ _Oh_.”

He revelation is not one Martin wants to have. He’s the human, the last, captive human in this place full of monsters. He’s just doing his best.

“Did you want to eat me, Martin?” Jon asks. “Was that your way of putting me in the Lonely, keeping me secret, keeping me _safe_.”

“No,” Martin whispers, feeling the blood flow out of his face. Jon obviously meant to upset him with the memory, but here he is intrigued and light-headed instead. “No, that’s not—”

Jon kisses him, sweet and without the bite Martin expects. That sort of kiss lasts for a few moments, before Jon’s teeth press down on the thin flesh and draw blood.

He sighs. “You should have fed,” Jon whispers. “What a waste.”


End file.
